Monday, April 2, 2012

Today's screenplay will make you reevaluate just how bad your kids really are.

Genre: Comedy-Horror
Premise: A young married couple who can't conceive decide to use in vitro fertilization. They realize something’s off, however, when their son starts acting like Satan.
About: You might remember this writer as he's the same writer who wrote The Wedding, the comedy I reviewed a couple of weeks ago about a particularly memorable wedding. I liked that script so much that I went searching for anything else by Goldberg and found this. Let’s hope it was worth the search!
Writer: Andrew Goldberg
Details: 107 pages – June 1, 2010 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

A few months ago I reviewed a script called Zombie Baby. It was about the unique challenges a young couple went through while raising a baby…who was a ZOMBIE. Then, last week a script sold called Hell Baby. I'm not sure what that one's about but I can probably guess. Today I'm reviewing a script called “My Son Is The Fucking Anti-Christ.” It's about a couple who learns their young son is the spawn of Satan.

As I tried to get to the source of this latest comedy trend, I came to the conclusion that there are just a lot of fucked up parents out there who happen to be writers. I mean clearly, these scripts are written by people who have children and who either think of them as the devil, or wonder what it would be like if they were the devil. Whatever the case, these people need help. But that doesn't mean their scripts can’t be funny. And since I really liked Zombie Baby, I was expecting to like “Anti-Christ” as well.

We’re in Costa Mesa San Diego, where I hear the weather is just fab, and that's where we meet Tim Baker, a likable sort of doofus in his 30s. Tim and his wife Julia are in the middle of being told by their doctor that Tim’s sperm suck. They try *really hard* to swim to Julia’s egg but give up a quarter of the way through. Could this be a metaphor for Tim as well? I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m looking for a lot of metaphors in a script titled “My Son Is The Fucking Anti-Christ.”

Anyway, Tim’s bummed that he’s never going to have kids. But after Julia cheers him up, she offers an alternative. Why don't they go to a sperm bank and get somebody else's sperm? It'll cost them a little money but at least they’ll have a child.

Like most men, Tim isn’t keen on having a baby that isn’t technically his. But in the end, Julia talks him into it, and the next thing Tim knows, he’s browsing through a donor brochure.

Now when you go to a sperm bank there are the top level sperm, the stuff from astrophysicists and world-class lawyers, and then there's the “B” level sperm, which basically amounts to the guy who stumbles off the street and needs a few extra bucks for his next crack high.

Unfortunately, the couple can only afford the “crack high” group, and since Tim doesn’t want his son to have four nipples, he’s ready to walk out. But at the last second, they find a seemingly perfect donor, someone they assume that the sperm bank mixed into the B group by accident. So Julia gets impregnated by our frozen mystery man and nine months later they have a baby, Zander.

Zander grows up as a normal cheery fun cute boy. But when he reaches six, strange things start happening around him. For example, his schoolteacher zombie-walks into the middle of the street where she meets the face of a bus at 40 miles per hour.

The death is a little suspicious, but nobody thinks much of it until the funeral. It’s there, in front of a large audience, where the priest launches into a graphic eulogy which includes how much he wants to bang the dead corpse of our deceased teacher. And oh yeah, a nefarious-looking Zander watches on with a smile.

Afterwards, the priest approaches Tim and Julia and insists that he was possessed by Satan's son during the speech, and oh yeah, Satan’s son is Zander!

Naturally, Tim thinks the priest is crazy. We all know these church workers have weird relationships with little boys. But after recruiting his semi-retarded best friend, Gary, Tim finds enough evidence to support the priest’s theory.

It's not easy learning that your beautiful little six-year old boy dreams of burning all human being in an eternal fire, so Tim isn't sure what to do. It’s not like you can bribe the spawn of Satan with a Tickle-Me Elmo. It also doesn’t help that the wifey doesn’t believe anything Tim says. But when Zander decides to escalate the destruction, Tim will need to figure out a way to not only save his family, but save the world.

As I tackle other questions in the movie world like, “I thought that the Twilight movies were over. Why is there another one coming out?” and “Did they clone Audrey Hepburn and put her in that Mirror Mirror movie?” I asked myself a simple question in regards to “Anti-Christ.” Why so lowest common denominator?

I mean I'm not gonna say that The Wedding was high-brow or anything. But the humor had some sophistication to it. Here in “Anti-Christ,” we get 16 different semen jokes within the first five pages. I get that everybody has a different sense of humor and different things make different people laugh, but as soon as I read all those jokes, one thing popped out at me – desperation.

When writers are just throwing out one bodily function joke out after another, it gives the impression that they have so little confidence in their idea and their story, that they’re trying to distract you with as many dumb jokes as possible. If they can keep that string going for 90 pages then maybe, just maybe, you won’t realize that there’s no movie here.

As you can probably guess, I’m not a fan of this approach.

And there’s a lot to cover up. For starters, the story just isn’t very imaginative. For example, in a scene that’s supposed to represent Zander becoming more dangerous, Tim looks for something underneath the bed and Zander starts jumping on it playfully. At first. Then he starts to jump harder and harder, until the bed collapses and injures Tim. I suppose you could shoot this in a way where it *might* be funny, but to me it just felt lazy. Aren’t their more creative concept-related ways to have your devil-child injure someone?

And the story itself just felt really small. Tim learns that that sperm bank they visited is sitting on top of a dungeon of some sort and that’s where our big climax happens. Therefore, when the finale comes, all I could imagine was a bunch of people battling each other inside a tiny 10 by 12 foot room. Like the rest of the script, it just felt too small.

And then there were a bunch of little miscellaneous missteps. For example, one of the key characters is a demon hunter, and he isn't even called upon until the last act! So you have this major character coming in super late. We have no time to get to know him, so we never really accept him, so everything he does feels like a cheat. It was almost like…why even bother?

There were a few funny moments in the script. I really loved when they went back to their original obstetrician to get some information about Zander, and it turns out he’s gone insane, cut out his tongue, and is now housed in an insane asylum. So they go visit him and ask him a bunch of questions, which he answers, but of course he can’t speak because he doesn’t have a tongue. So the whole time he’s just conversing in awkward noises. Our characters, then, basically play a game of charades to figure out what he’s saying. That was the one scene where I genuinely laughed out loud.

But outside of that, this just didn't feel very well formulated. It could be an early draft of course, so we need to take that into consideration. But, in my opinion, this is an example of Goldberg's early work, and he’s since become a much better writer, which is why The Wedding shows so much more maturity.

What I learned: Something that isn't talked about very often in screenwriting is conveying the size and scope of things in your script. If you undersell a key description, it could have confusing ramifications throughout the rest of the story. I was just reading this script that took place on an island and a portion of the island was separated off to withhold some dangerous creatures. But the writer never told us if the sectioned off area was as big as Manhattan or as small as a city block. So I never got a concrete idea of how big the threat actually was. A Manhattan-sized section could hold hundreds of thousands of creatures. A city block-sized section, on the other hand, might hold hundreds of creatures. That was my problem with this whole underground dungeon area in “Anti-Christ.” I had no idea how big it was so I kept imagining a tiny little dungeon room. Therefore the big climax battle in the end felt small and limited in scope. So you can see how one mis-represented description can have huge ramifications throughout the entire story.